Who Ya Gonna Blame?
George Bush! That didn’t take long, either. Turns out it’s his fault they can’t close Guantanamo right away. Obama admin officials complain about lack of comprehensive case files. Turns out shutting down the law enforcement operation formerly known as GWOT is complicated. Washington Post:
President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.
Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.
Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.
But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses.
After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now “backpedaling and trying to buy time” by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.
Turns out the conflict previously referred to as the Global War On Terror was complicated, and involved a number of defense and intelligence agencies, some of which operate with high degrees of secrecy and historically have been unwilling to contribute information to prosecutions in open court. Let alone to gabby political appointees. The article, meanwhile, goes on to describe massive complexity and inefficiency in the handling of cases that almost makes it sound like, I dunno, a government health-care system or something.
Anyway, if they are looking for excuses not to close the place, here’s a good one. All that international pressure on Bush to let jihadis out? Here’s a couple. There’s an 11 percent recidivism rate for former Gitmo detainees that they know about. There’s two ways of looking at that number. It’s actually not bad as criminal recidivism rates go, and tends to undercut the argument that imprisoning terrorism suspects creates terrorists. Much like this report from last spring on Iraqi detainees. Maybe Gitmo isn’t so bad after all. The other way of looking at it is, it’s a war, what’s the rush to let jihadis return to the battlefield?
Let’s try a fun historical exercise, and pretend its 1944, when the United States was holding thousands of Axis prisoners, in camps from Norman Rockwell’s New England to John Wayne’s High Plains. Imagine the headlines:
“Freed Fritzes Manning Nazi Uboats!”
“Former Montana Detainee Returns to Battlefield!”
Here’s a good one:
“Nazi Defense Team Seeks Bail for Detainee”
How about, “Kraut POW’s Lawyers Subpoena FDR!”
Topics: GWOT, Guantanamo, Nazis, Obama, hated Crusaders, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:26 am on Sunday, January 25, 2009
5 Responses to “Who Ya Gonna Blame?”
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January 25th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
That’s fine. The more they make excuses like this, the less people will believe them over time. Blaming Bush will get old, fast.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Obama admin officials complain about lack of comprehensive case files.
Hey, we’re talking about the federal government, which documents everything down to the smallest minutiae, using more paper in a day than most small countries do in a year. Go on, tell me another one.
January 25th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I think blaming Bush will work for at least two more years if not his entire four. Who’s going to argue with them? The media? Don’t make me laugh. We’ll be reading handwringing articles like this one for quite some time.
Under Bush it was “what’s wrong with these people? Can’t they do anything right?”
Under Obama it’s “they want to do what’s right, but the previous administration mucked it up so bad it’s going to take much longer than they thought to straighten it out.”
I don’t look for the media to remove their nose from Obama’s ass any time soon.
January 25th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
[...] still okay to maintain your hate for Bush, too. The best way to “love” everyone is to hate Emmanuel Goldstein George W. Bush. Who um, only kept everyone so safe that no one in the Inaugural [...]
January 26th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Antimedia, you’re right about the media response, but it doesn’t matter. At some point, and it will happen pretty quickly, people will stop taking Bush blaming as anything but a lousy excuse from the Obama Administration. It doesn’t matter if the MSM is backing him up on it, it will simply be seen as a parroting of what Obama is saying.
It makes sense if you think about it. Obama got elected by saying he can do a much better job than Bush did. His supporters believe this. They will not be happy if he blames his failures on Bush. He’s supposed to be so much better, remember? He’s the fixer. He’s the change we were waiting for. Anything Bush could do, he can do better - including fixing anything that Bush, in their minds, screwed up. That’s what they are thinking, anyway.